Which Is Your Better Self At Work: Smoked Or Pulled?

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is back at it in a new piece about "bringing your whole self to work." 

As a cybersecurity leader, your priority is managing risks by getting the most out of your team. AI is going to smoke you like a brisket if you think it will be business as usual once you integrate AI across the organization. Instead, you need your people to be engaged, one of the four pillars of a successful cyber-defense team.

But what is employee engagement, and how do I get people to buy into that?

A shift in management culture starting in the '00s emphasized employee engagement as the key to business-unit productivity. I might have had something to do with that shift. An outgrowth of the shift was the idea that people who were able to be fully present at work would be more productive or happier. And certainly from a societal perspective this makes sense. Employees are not as worried as they used to be about whether they will be accepted without being strictly "normal" or "typical"; think people such as those with service animals, people whose impairments require adaptive equipment, people who have same-sex spouses, people with tattoos, women in leadership, atheists, or people who have survived medical problems that a few years ago would have led them to leave the workforce. 

Then we had the covid-19 pandemic. Organizations to the extent possible had employees either work from home or work while at the work site in staggered shifts or with new safety protocols. One upshot was that when working at home, people worked like they were, well, at home, and at home you can always be yourself.

As organizations implemented return to work policies -- which are in some cases effective for employees -- the people who returned to work expected to be able to continue being their at-home-worker-self in the office, because that seems to be what they feel is authentic. 

Tomas says that this is a bad idea for employees (and we're not going to talk about problems it causes employers) at any level. As Tomas mentions, he's not even welcome to "bring his whole self" to family events. 

This leaves you with a few options.

You could continue to "be authentic" and "bring your whole self to work." We're not going to tell you that you cannot be authentic, but annoyingly, other people think that they too are "being authentic," and you probably don't like that. So if everyone's authentic and everyone dislikes other people's authenticity, you're setting up a very unhealthy workplace dynamic.

Another option is to do what Tomas suggests: bring your best self to work. This is the person who focuses, makes an effort to get along, supports the team, provides the best customer service that they can, and looks for ways to be productive. 

Managers need to do the engagement work to get people out of the home-worker rut so that people feel their best self is the one in the office, not at home scrolling social media.

Don't be saucy. After all, you applied for this job, right?

You can choose Waylon or Merle. But either way, choose to bring the best, most engaged employee or most engaging leader you can bring to work every day.

Ask us how you can get out of the smoker.